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Tips & Comparison of Top Communication Platforms for your Organization

Communication is essential between an organization and its customers, and organizations are investing a lot of time, money, and effort in building healthy communications with clients. Although we missed seeing the big picture, communication is a continuous interaction, and it lies at the crux of building strong customer relationships. Fortunately, it's not rocket science. The right communication platform can bridge the conversational gap between organizations and clients. 

To find you the best solution, we conducted a deep study and came up with effective strategies and handpicked top communication companies that do it to their utmost potential. 

Before that, let us discover what a customer communication platform is;

Understanding a customer communication platform

A customer communication platform is a business software tool used by organizations to deal with all the inbound and outbound customer conversations in one place. It is a tool where your customer support agents can access past customer discussions, use the information to help customers, and engage with them.

As customer communication can happen on an array of channels, communication platforms can be classified into;

  • Support desk tools
  • Live chat
  • Call center tools
  • Client review and survey tools, etc. 

Why does your business need a communication platform?

The right communication platform can fundamentally work on the core internal and external communications. Here is a glimpse of the top advantages why your organization should have one:

Deals with multiple communication channels

Manually overseeing communication channels like live chat, email, or telephone can prompt chaos and reduce productivity when volumes are high. But with a sound customer communication tool in place, you can oversee all the communication channels that are significant for your business.

Provides 24/7 Services

Many customers or potential customers may not contact your help desk team as soon as they see an advert. They would ideally go through competitor sites before deciding to contact you. This process may take hours, days or even months – not to forget – they could reach out to you in the middle of the night. 

By making a diverse set of FAQs along with keyword bots, support articles, guides, and so forth, you can reduce support costs and ticket volumes. However, you must keep in mind that bots are a bit of a tricky situation. In the case of Live Chats Vs. Chatbots, we suggest you the first. 

Communication capabilities across organization

Just as talking with customers, a customer communication platform can likewise assist you with upgrading the nature of internal communications of your organization. For example, one can chat with the other team member or talk about support tickets utilizing private notes so all staff members are on the same page when it comes to servicing external parties. 

Personalization according to customer context

Modern customers request a customized experience each time they collaborate with your organization. With the right tool, your customer support executives can analyze audience data and past conversations with the customer and provide top-notch services. They can acquire knowledge of customer activities and interests to send them customized replies.

Measures team performance

Do you believe you have all the necessary resources to capture the heart of your customers? There is just a single method for finding it. You can understand how well your team is taking care of customer communications with the help of the right customer communication tool. You can even share quick reviews, get feedback, and measure consumer loyalty.

What to look for in a customer communication platform?

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The capacity to hold communication channels together

Your customer communication platform should make it simple for you to oversee discussions across various channels. For instance, Facebook is the most used social network, and Instagram is no slouch. Both should be leveraged to build your overall customer engagement.

However, they are both two distinct channels and two different feeds. Companies need to have an organized and optimized approach to handling customer communication. Your platform must allow you to connect with your social media channels from a single dashboard.

It should act as a one-stop destination to oversee all customer engagement. It assists you with focusing on your replies and helps ensure you never miss a message. Unified communication channels additionally bind together the customer experience. A decent customer communication tool will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of every client.

Keep in mind to have a look at the dashboard of the tool your team will be working with; The dashboard must have an intuitive UI.

A rich message format

Ensure you can speak with your clients with something more than just text. Your customer communication platform should allow you to utilize pictures, buttons, schedules, maps, forms, videos, and significantly more.

Graphic interfaces provide a vastly improved experience than just text-based chatbots. They discard the steps in the customer lifecycle and assist your customers in reaching the objectives quicker. The outcome will be a consistent and smooth experience that your customers will appreciate.

Automation

Most organizations need to incline toward automation to deliver the type of service their customers anticipate. Automation assists customers with finding quick solutions to basic inquiries. It additionally allows human executives to focus on high-priority jobs.

The customer communication tool should sustain the degree of automation that appears to be legit for your business. We have all seen instances of awful automation and baffling chatbots. You need to ensure your customer communication tool improves algorithms so the service doesn’t confuse the customer.

The Balance between Human & Automation

The harmony between automation and human assistance is necessary for building loyalty. Your customer communication platform should assist with improvising your work processes and assets. For this, you will require a tool that assists you with dealing with the handoff between chatbots and people. This leads to more productive teams and fulfilled customers. Chatbots alone are not the solution, so keep in mind to strike that healthy balance.

Personalization

Personalization is significant for organizations going forward. A study discovered that 80% of clients are bound to buy products and services from brands that deliver personalized experiences. Furthermore, we are not simply talking about addressing someone by the first name in the email. What's necessary today is a lot further than that. Your customer communication tool should assist you with bringing together customer information across channels so you can analyze and make your discussions more relatable.

Self-service

Many customer engagement platforms permit customers to quickly spot what they are searching for by themselves without the help of the support executive. This ability can improve customers' interest in your brand as it is easier for them to find solutions to your brand's products or services.

Eventually, you will rank higher in the search engine ranking due to the low bounce rate. One way you can host self-service is by providing them with a knowledge resource.

Security

Up next is security. Try to choose a seller who's compliant with your local information and security guidelines. Data storage platforms are attractive targets for hackers. Ensure that the provider is capable of securing the privacy of your and your customers’ confidential data. These strategies ought to incorporate encryption, access testing, and confidentiality agreements.

Best Platform Comparison

Click Connector

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Are you looking for an end-to-end communication solution? Then this is for you! with Click Connector, you can deal all your customer communication from one spot and gain better analysis, control, and experiences. You can view, track, monitor, break down and team up on communication processes conveniently. 

The Unibox is a sought-after product of Click Connector. All inboxes across the entirety of your communication channels are connected to one single platform and provide a single dashboard. That’s not all! The Team-up feature gives the best answers for your clients as chats are been delegated to ensure staff productivity.

Click Connector is best suitable for startups, individual users and SMBs because; 

  • Transfer conversations among representatives efficiently depending on their abilities, occupancy, and skill.
  • Robust inbox with the capacity to incorporate new communication channels.
  • With Unibox, you can find, view, track unattended discussions and ensure you don't miss out on anything.
  • Respond with predefined and customized messages.
  • Automatically route social media comments to customer representatives to avoid several agents attending the same comment.
  • Labels and groups help you track each conversation and create reports to determine trends. Organize your Unibox with custom labels based on your needs and priorities for easy filtering and analyzing.
  • Generate in-depth reports on leads, customers, campaigns and agents in a few minutes automatically.

Fresh Desk

Would you like to take the communication with your audience to a higher level? Then, Freshdesk should forever be on your list. You can undoubtedly change your conversation over the telephone, email, live chat, and social media into customer tickets and track them in one spot.

Freshdesk permits your executives to team up viably and produce better support experiences. You can easily organize and prioritize tickets using the Freshdesk ticketing management system. For example, you can impart the responsibility of a ticket to several executives. Also, executives can involve other colleagues in a conversation just inside the ticket and gather expert suggestions.

This omnichannel communication platform can also handle SLAs and help resolve issues and meet deadlines. You can have your own ticket statuses with your custom work processes and has AI ticket routing.

There is additionally a chatbot with canned reactions. Freshdesk is incredible at smoothing out team efforts for support departments. You get knowledge resources, FAQs, self-assistance forums, and customer satisfaction analysis.

Freshdesk is best suited for individual users, startup businesses, and small ventures.

Some of the key features of Freshdesk:

  • Connect with, help, and support customers via live chat in real-time.
  • Deal with your organization's social media accounts from inside the helpdesk
  • Send email messages automatically and keep everybody posted with progress in tickets.
  • Permit suitable solutions to pop-up for clients and save your representatives' time.
  • Program to automatically receive the customer communication reports in your inbox

Zen desk

Zendesk is a customer support tool that allows you to make your representatives engage with customers through WhatsApp and other communication platforms. It is an omnichannel platform, and they can view them from the same tool without signing into the messaging application or other contact pages, like Facebook or Instagram. Likewise, you can track daily activities of your representatives and can assess each employees' daily or monthly performance metrics. 

In addition to WhatsApp, Zendesk also focuses on many other platforms. For instance, you can also integrate Facebook, Instagram, or Gmail and make tasks easier for your representatives. You can even involve Zendesk in technical support and sales. 

The omnichannel communication feature tool is pricey, hence we suggest using it only if its truly needed. 

This tool is best intended for organizations of medium-high scale because; 

  • With the help of real-time notifications, everybody in the team is updated with ongoing tickets.
  • Improves team efficiency and integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams
  • Routes and escalates tickets to the most appropriate representatives
  • Allows representatives to add to knowledge base resources.

Crisp

Crisp is one of the all-in-one multichannel communication tools for coordinating with customers through email, instant messaging apps, Twitter, SMS, and different tools such as live chats and chatbots. Crisp additionally has an integrated helpdesk that permits customers to access help articles from live chat and find solutions on their own. Crisp has an intuitive live chat that supports rich media files like voice/video messages, GIFs, document attachments, and surprisingly an in-chat game! 

One of the fundamental reasons organizations like Crisp is because of its free plan. It offers essential services like live chat and fundamental analytics. Their pro plan is $25/month for four representatives. It has a few perfect features like auto triggers, geo-location map, limitless chat history, and Facebook Messenger integration. It’s also available on mobile app and web-based applications.

It is best suited for individual users, small and medium-sized organizations because;

  • Enables document sharing and social connect
  • An in-chat game to keep your guests engaged when you are away to answer to them!
  • A centralized dashboard containing live chat, messages, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Line, Telegram, and SMS. Hence, your team can reply to every one of your customers ' inquiries from the dashboard itself.
  • Reduces customer inquiries by setting up a support desk work where customers can find the solution themselves.
  • Crisp’s autopilot lead generation eliminates time zone constraints and allows organizations to produce leads even when team members are away.

Kayako

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This unified customer service tool assists organizations with overseeing customer inquiries and communications over any channel, supporting customers in all possible angles. Kayako draws an obvious connection between support channels, customer data, and the team, combining email, social, and live chat discussions together in one spot.

It also assists clients with helping themselves through Kayako's help desk permitting customers to address their own inquiries, instantly and easily. Help desk analytics empower clients to follow the phrases customers are looking for to improve content. Brands can likewise construct and modify many help centers. 

Kayako brings together all client communications by picturing customer lifecycle. The messenger allows users to help clients with a live chat experience that is pretty much as instinctive as messaging their companions. Brands can also help clients instantly with a live chat on their mobile site or on custom applications.

HelpScout

HelpScout is a customer support and helpdesk tool, that is suited for organizations of all sizes. One can work consistently across several teams, or deal with a few products or brands from one account. It also helps to identify recurrent tasks with work processes, including basic automation based on an ‘if-then’ rule.

The collision identification feature allows clients to observe who is seeing or answering real-time, by notes, @ mentions and permit users to interact privately. Clients can utilize tagging to segment discussions, trigger automation for all activities or even create custom folders. 

HelpScout’s report analytics enable clients to quantify team performance, spot patterns to forestall issues and monitor customer satisfaction without an Excel sheet. It flawlessly integrates with Olark and Snap Engage. So that each chat is saved in the client's profile. Additionally, over 50 voice message services are supported on HelpScout

Zoho Desk

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Zoho Desk is a powerful communication management platform that can be used to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. With its omnichannel abilities, you can oversee client communication across many channels like email, chat, telephone, social network, and your site.

It also allows your team to implant an adaptable web form widget right on your site. Thus, paving way for customers to visit your site. They can complete a small form, share their issues, and your team can track tickets in a single spot. You can even implant an information base on your site or mobile application.

Zoho Desk's AI component performs analysis and suggests solutions to the agents. There are collaboration features to organize tickets and share CRM information. You can even set up your teams' tasks and assign them accordingly. There are many automated work processes for routing tickets and SLAs.

Zoho Desk is best for Individual users, small groups, startups, and SMBs because; 

  • Ability to integrate with other business applications and include custom abilities through APIs
  • Set up a help desk for all your various brands
  • Track the time spent on each help ticket and its associated tasks.
  • Make templates for email replies and notifications to save representative's time
  • Constantly monitor service-level agreements and escalate SLA breaches automatically.

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a customer support management solution that works across all channels, incorporating a cutting-edge help desk and a ticketing framework. The connection is fast, solid, and boosts the productivity of your customer support team. With a proactive live chat, you can transform potential leads into confirmed leads. 

Tickets can be shared, united, and split. Representatives can likewise converse with clients over live chats or social media. There is also a call center team to deal with inbound calls. You can automate work processes based on SLA rules or time frames.

In addition, it assembles information on premium customers and organizations for quality lead generation. There are email formats, canned reactions for chatting, and predefined replies in FAQs.

With the assistance of savvy chat directing options, your clients or potential customers can talk with experts that are ideally suited to give them the right kind of help. When one agent can simultaneously deal with numerous chats, you can save support costs.

LiveAgent is best suited for individual clients, startups, and SMBs because; 

  • The ability to pick a significant chat button and command the attention of site guests
  • Personalize the look and feel of your chat window
  • Watch guests as they browse through your site and cooperate with them
  • Get a view of the messages while the client is typing.
  • Browse around 43 dialects to set your multilingual chat widget

Intercom

Established in 2011, Intercom is a renowned customer communication platform that assists organizations to study and customize their communications with customers. It helps teams regardless of sales, support, and marketing with its suite of integrated services. You can even personalize your support for various audiences with bots that proactively message clients on your behalf. 

Chatbots and automation route your discussions to the right agent and resolve your general client inquiries, managing the balance between machine and human touch. Also, you can connect 260+ applications such as Jira and Aircall to flawlessly support your clients.

Intercom is best suitable for medium and large-scale businesses because;

  • Intercom allows organizations to follow and comprehend their customer conduct.
  • Send in-application messages to your customers after they engage with the platform to strike a discussion.
  • Intuitive message editor that permits you to fabricate message formats in minutes.
  • A/B testing to work on the performance of your email, push, and in-application messages by testing variations.

Conclusion

There is no question that powerful communication lies at the core of solid customer relationships. However, if you are sending proactive notifications to clients, improving your customer support, or advertising a product, there is a tool to assist you with better results.

Using the most suitable customer communication tool, you can integrate other channels, converse conveniently and analyze data for future performance. Keep in mind picking the best tool for your group will require some research, just like your customers do when engaging with your organization.

Tips to follow when choosing a platform

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  • Know what "fruitful customer communication" signifies your business
  • Take ideas from individuals from various teams
  • Check the nature of support presented by the provider of the tool.
  • Check the reviews and evaluations shared by users on the software comparison platforms.
  • Inquire as to whether there are any hidden or over-head charges included
  • Pick a tool that offers high-information security
  • Go for a communication platform that accompanies a free trial

Written by

Amelia Novah
Amelia Novah
13 mins

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